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StorageCraft HeadStartRestore technology

A flying start: pre-stage a system recovery before disaster strikes.

StorageCraft® HeadStart Restore® (HSR) technology lets you start a restore operation before a disaster hits. Should a server fail, a pre-staged restore operation greatly reduces downtime, especially when multi-terabyte systems are involved. Migrate or restore in the time it takes to reboot a server.

If your server dies, your standby volume is identical to your dead server’s volume, short of one or more incremental backups. Those can be added, and then you’re ready to restore.

Your standby volume can be a virtual or physical disk. Virtual disks can be restored to a local or network drive or to a VMware ESX/ESXi Server. Physical disks can be restored to a locally attached device.

Use HSR in these scenarios:

Hardware Failure

While you repair a downed database server, the business won’t even notice it’s not available. Employees can still access the database because you’ve set up a temporary virtual machine (VM) with StorageCraft VirtualBoot™ technology. In this VM, changes to the database will continue being recorded and stored in incremental backups. You would then set up an HSR to the repaired database server. Once the most recent incremental backup from your temp VM is applied to your repaired server, finalize the HSR job, take the VM down, and bring up the database server—as if nothing happened (as far as your clients know, that is).

Planned Migration

Migrate a 2TB database server to a new environment without needing three days of downtime to get it done. While your database server continues to run, use HeadStart Restore to send a full backup image of this server’s disk and subsequent incrementals into a VM file. Once you’re ready to switch over, you’ll then apply the most recent incremental backup to your new server and bring it online. Use StorageCraft Hardware Independent Restore™ technology to get the migrated operating system to boot on the new machine.

Virtual Standby

Be prepared with a standby if your primary server fails. You can set up HSR to create your standby volume as a virtual disk and place it on an ESXi host. If the server does fail, then you finalize your HSR job (which stops adding changes to the volume) and reboot (with the help of the StorageCraft Recovery Environment). Bring your standby copy online as a replacement for the failed primary server.